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November
14, 2004
STATE OF THE GAMEGreat Scott!
By Lyle Phair | From 
“After a lifetime
of hockey, I have come to realize that players, given the opportunity,
can excel even beyond their expectations.”
That’s a comment that could have been made
by almost anyone involved in hockey, or in any sport for that matter.
The fact that it was made by perhaps the greatest coach in the history
of the NHL makes it all that much more meaningful.
At the time, the retired Scotty Bowman was discussing
his latest project, Making the Cut, hockey’s version of reality
television. Sixty-eight hopefuls were scheduled to endure a two-week,
made-for-TV training camp run by Bowman and former NHL coach Mike
Keenan, hoping to win one of six spots in a real, live NHL training
camp in 2005. But at the same time his statement spoke volumes about
his experiences in the game and what he’s learned from the
players he’s coached and coached against. Given the chance,
who knows how good a player can become?
As kids all across the country get set to begin
another long and hopefully successful – but oftentimes potentially
disappointing – hockey season, Bowman’s statement is
something every parent, every coach and every player should spend
some time thinking about.
On every team there will be one or some “best
players” and on every team there will be one or some “worst
players” and there will be several others who fall somewhere
in between those two categories. That’s a given. It happens
at every level. On every NHL team there are star players, the ones
who people are willing to pay out big bucks to watch play. On those
same teams, there are fringe players, who could just as easily be
switched with the top players on the team’s minor league affiliate
and most people wouldn’t even know the difference.
And then there are those in between. No different
than on a college team, junior team, midget team, squirt team, mite
team or even a men’s beer league team (except for the part
about paying big bucks to watch them play).
And everybody knows who’s who. It is not
that difficult to see whom the best players are and to see whom
the worst players are. Occasionally, there will be some who are
delusional, or see things through ‘parent goggles’ and
have a different assessment of the abilities of certain players.
But for the most part, everyone knows, including the players. You
don’t have to tell the worst player he is the worst player.
He already knows.
| The coach’s role is to make sure everybody
is ready to play the best that they can play and then give them
the opportunity to do it because you never know how good a player
can be when given the chance. |
But at the end of the day, they all have one thing
in common. They are all on the team. If they are successful, they
win as a team. If they are not, they lose as a team. Well at least
that’s the theory anyway. At the youth level, that depends
a great deal on how the winning and losing is handled by the coaches
and the parents, which ultimately effects how the players handle
it. And that’s the important part.
When things go well (when a team is winning),
there are typically no problems. Everybody is happy. Or even if
they’re not, they appear happy. It’s not as easy to
rock the boat when you’re winning. When things go sour (when
a team is losing), that’s when the stuff hits the fan. The
fingers start to point and the blame starts to be assigned.
More often than not, the first, most obvious and
easiest target for blame is the worst player or group worst players.
Surely they were the ones who lost the game. It couldn’t have
been the best players, could it? It couldn’t have been the
average players? It had to have been the worst players. They are
not as good as the rest of the players, so it must be their fault.
But was it really?
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes
the worst players, through no fault of their own, never get enough
significant playing time to make a difference. Sometimes they rarely
get off of the bench. It’s tough to be at fault when you never
get to play.
With nine Stanley Cups and the most coaching wins
in the history of the NHL, Scotty Bowman knows a little bit about
coaching and more than a little bit about the players he coached.
One of the reasons why he was as successful as he was, was that
he realized something that many coaches do not: Sometimes your better
players win the games for you and sometimes your worst players win
the games for you.
A trademark of almost every team Bowman coach
– whether he was with the Montreal Canadiens dynasty of the
mid-to-late 1970s, which won four Stanley Cups in a row, or the
Detroit Red Wings perennial powerhouses of the mid-to-late 1990s,
which captured three Stanley Cups with Bowman at the helm –
was the strength of their “worst” players.
Bowman understood that the stars were the stars
and if they performed, you had a good chance of winning. But if
the other teams’ stars performed just as well, you also had
a good chance of losing. Or if the other teams “worst”
players neutralized your team’s best players, you also had
a good chance of losing.
To him, Canadiens third-liners like Doug Jarvis,
Doug Risebrough, Rejean Houle, Yvon Lambert and Mario Tremblay were
just as vital to the team as were the stars like Guy Lafleur, Jacques
Lemaire and Steve Shutt. Ditto in Detroit for grind-liners like
Kris Draper, Kirk Maltby, Joey Kocur and Darren McCarty sharing
importance with stars Sergei Fedorov, Brendan Shanahan and Steve
Yzerman.
In fact, the grinders might have been more important
than the stars.
Obviously, youth hockey is a horse of a different
color. But the premise remains the same: You are only as good as
your weakest link. At the highest levels of the game, the coach’s
role is to make sure everybody is ready to play the best that they
can play and get the right people on the ice at the right time to
win the game.
At the youth level, it’s a little different.
The coach’s role is to make sure everybody is ready to play
the best that they can play and then give them the opportunity to
do it because you never know how good a player can be when given
the chance.
This article appears in the November issue
of New England Hockey Journal. Click
here to subscribe to the magazine.
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